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By Gray Brechin When Willa Baum retired from the Regional Oral History Office in August 2000, she left behind not only the 1,700 interviews she and her staff had conducted but the style and standard of a profession, one she practically invented. This immense body of preserved memory--the spoken reminiscences of Californian governors and judges, winemakers and miners, whalers and suffragettes--has been a treasure trove for scholars and journalists. Berkeley’s oral history project this year celebrates its 50th year of existence; for 46 of those years, Baum and the staff she trained devoted themselves to the self-effacing service of listening well to others. It was, she said, “the greatest job in the world.” The Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) under Baum’s direction could well be the subject of studies by anthropologists and management experts. “I never saw another University office where there was so little ego involvement,” said Susan O’Hara, former director of the Disabled Students Program. “There was a genuine search for truth there.”
With Baum’s support, O’Hara initiated an ambitious project--now considered a model of its kind--to document Berkeley’s famous disability-rights movement. Of her own involvement in hundreds of oral history projects, Baum will only say: “I give myself credit for knowing a good idea when I heard it and then working to make it happen.” Now being interviewed herself, Baum is seated at her dining table in the modest Julia Morgan brown-shingle she has lived in for nearly half a century, her green Amazon parrot interjecting an occasional squawk. The oral history project began in an off-hand sort of way, she recalls, when English professor James D. Hart--later director of the Bancroft Library--suggested that one of his graduate students interview Alice B. Toklas while visiting Paris, since both Toklas and Gertrude Stein had spent their youths in the Bay Area. Hart was hoping to revive Hubert Howe Bancroft’s practice of sending interviewers into the field to capture the recollections of those who had shaped the West. (Bancroft’s agents took dictation in longhand from pioneers, silver kings, and other big players; the files of those interviews are among the Bancroft Library’s most precious possessions for researchers.) Bancroft’s project had languished for more than half a century until commercial tape recorders made it possible to preserve the spoken word without the cumbersome machinery needed for wax cylinders. In 1948, American historian Allan Nevins initiated the first modern oral history program, at Columbia University, recording and meticulously transcribing the recollections of living subjects, often near the ends of their lives. A decade later, Nevins’s pioneering project had amassed 100,000 pages of transcribed text. On this coast, Berkeley’s project was then getting off the ground under Baum’s direction. Though many universities now have oral history programs, Randall Jarrell, director of the UC Santa Cruz Regional History Project, today calls Columbia’s and Berkeley’s the nation’s best. He describes Baum as “the midwife of Western oral history,” someone who had “an instinctive grasp of what oral history could become and prodded its development into a systematic method of primary-source creation.” Baum was aware of Nevins’s work when she arrived at Cal from Mills College, where she had earned a master’s degree in Constitutional history. At Mills, and Whittier before that, she had aspired to become a great trial lawyer (“like Clarence Darrow”), but in Berkeley’s history department she became absorbed by California’s past. Having to work her way through the doctoral program while raising a growing family (which ultimately included six children), Baum supported herself with teaching assistantships and by moonlighting at an adult school in Oakland’s Chinatown. She loved mentoring students. “Those were wonderful years,” she says, “because the guys who came home from the war were so smart and lively.” Fellow teacher Eleanor Swent recalled that Baum became a legend as an English instructor in Chinatown: “Her students loved her because she had so much fun with them--playing games, singing songs, dancing--as well as teaching superbly.” When Swent came to ROHO to initiate a mining history series, in 1985, she quickly learned to appreciate “the same skill which made Willa a superb teacher in adult school--kindness, good humor, love of the English language, tolerance for individual variations, and patience.” ROHO formally began in 1954 when, at Hart’s urging, President Robert Gordon Sproul provided it with funds. Baum’s fellow graduate student Corinne Gilb, M.A. ’51, was the program’s first director, and she invited Baum to work with her. The women decided to call the program the Regional Cultural History Project--an ambiguous name they felt gave them greater freedom. Because the project paid by the hour, it allowed Gilb and Baum the flexibility they needed to work and raise families at the same time. That ROHO was usually entirely staffed by women was, Baum felt, at least partially a function of the stringency under which it labored. Men had to make a living, while most of her staff had husbands to support them. “The people we hired were housewives; they’d dropped out of the job market. They wanted something to do that was intelligent, and they found it here.” The project hit a political nerve early on when Sproul asked the women to do an oral history of UC Regent John Francis Neylan. Baum calls Neylan a “dangerous regent” because, as William Randolph Hearst’s chief attorney with close ties to the Hearst newspapers, Neylan had enormous political clout and had been a leading proponent of the Loyalty Oath, which had recently torn the University. California history professor Walton Bean co-conducted the interviews, which proved “a disaster,” according to Baum. “Bean had very definite ideas,” she explains, “and Neylan didn’t understand or like him. But Bean would not step back or be uninvolved. His ego was involved.” Though Baum and Gilb were still inventing their profession, they quickly figured out that being combative was not the way to conduct a successful interview. Baum remembers that the oath controversy was so recent--and so raw--that final transcription was taken out of their hands, and the published version was stripped of anything that might offend anyone in the University. Furthermore, Baum’s superior in the library administration grew so nervous about the tapes’ content--Neylan had been quite uninhibited in the interviews--that he had the tapes erased. Whatever she may have felt about Neylan’s politics, Baum grieves to this day about the loss of those tapes. “It broke my heart, because Neylan was a dynamic character in California history, and you couldn’t understand him unless you heard him speak. Only then could you understand why he was such a big mover and shaker in California. We lost all that.” After Gilb left for a job in Detroit, in 1958 Baum took over the office, never completing her own Ph.D. because she had found what she wanted to do. In 1965, the University made the renamed Regional Oral History Office a division of the Bancroft Library. By that time, Baum and her staff had completed or were working on 109 interviews. As word of low-paid but interesting work at ROHO spread, talented individuals applied for jobs or simply walked in the door; many stayed for decades. Each brought with them interests that grew into expertise, or they developed their knowledge on the job under Baum’s tutelage. Professor Bean brought in Amelia Fry, whom Baum sent to Washington to talk with suffragettes who had known California poet Sara Bard Field. “The elderly women were thrilled,” says Baum, “and they would call her back to lobby for the Equal Rights Amendment. Amelia did a whole series on the suffragettes which is among the most heavily used in the collection.”
The interviews conducted for a good oral history must be preceded by extensive research and followed by transcription, editing, and publication--a process that costs $18,000 and up per volume. Staff sometimes worked for free in crowded attic offices in the Doe Library Annex, Baum staying after hours to make sure that all correspondence was up to date and that she knew what everyone was doing. She kept ideas filed in a “limbo drawer” until she could find money to make them happen. All agree that she was exceptionally imaginative and far-sighted, and so persistent that most of her projects eventually moved from limbo to realization. Baum had, for example, wanted a series on mining twenty years before she and Swent were able to launch it. Baum also had long wanted to do an ambitious oral history project around the California governorship of Earl Warren. But the then-chief justice resisted. She asked Warren’s old friend, Horace Albright, to intercede, which Albright did when the two Cal friends (from the Class of 1912) met while mountain climbing in the Mediterranean. By the time the Warren project was completed, the ROHO staff had interviewed 149 individuals connected with his years in Sacramento. It took 13 years to complete, comprised 53 volumes, and marked the first time that a state’s past had been so thoroughly documented with oral histories. The Warren series served as a model for subsequent projects on the terms of governors Goodwin Knight and Ronald Reagan, which continue to provide invaluable source material for researchers. Even as her staff grew, Baum worked with colleagues from around the country to develop professional standards. She attended colloquia and academic conferences to network and make ROHO projects known to scholars, while her staff published books and articles based on their own work. Many oral historians regard Baum’s small book, Oral History for the Local Historical Society, as the essential how-to manual for the field. Charles Morrissey, past president of the Oral History Association, points out that Baum was the first to invite an independent evaluation of a major oral history project, in order to improve its standards. As a scholar, I first encountered ROHO’s trade-mark blue volumes in 1978 while doing research on Berkeley architects at the Bancroft Library. Many years earlier, the University had acquired a handsome Mediterranean villa south of campus as a residence for a vice president; records in the attic indicated that an unusual architect had designed it. Baum assigned Suzanne Reiss to document the building and its architect--a student and frequent collaborator with Bernard Maybeck named Julia Morgan. Though Morgan had died in 1957, many people connected with her were still alive. Riess and architectural historian Sally Woodbridge were able to assemble a series of interviews that shed light, from numerous angles, on a woman who has since risen to iconic status, largely because of what those interviews revealed about her. That one can most closely approach the truth by examing multiple perspectives on a given topic or person has long been a guiding tenet of ROHO. Those interviewed said that Morgan was a superb teacher, as well as a perfectionist who expected the best from people who worked with her. Baum’s way of leading the Regional Oral History Office was much the same. When I asked Baum how she created such an esprit de corps, she said, in her self-effacing manner: “I guess it was because we were not hierarchical. We hired top-notch people, and there was never a sense that one person was better than another. We all just tried to do the best we could.” As she concluded her reflections upon the past half century, it was clear that the woman who preserved so much of California’s history richly deserves an oral history of her own. Gray Brechin ’72, M.A. ’78, Ph.D. ’98, a research associate in the Department of Geography, is the author of several books, including Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (UC Press). |
 April 2004
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